GSA tests new customer experience index

GSA tests new customer experience index

Share

The General Services Administration has been testing a new customer experience index — similar to those produced by economic research groups like Forrester — to gather feedback on the agency’s digital tools.

This year, the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies used the Government Customer Experience Index, or GCXi for short, to survey nearly 9,000 federal employees from 135 agencies on a variety of topics, according to Rachel Flagg, an analyst in OCSIT’s Digital Government Division. Using tools already at its disposal, like the Digital Analytics Program and its Web dashboard, the office was able to benchmark satisfaction by gathering data from emails sent to agencies and pop-up survey questions for visitors (including citizens) to several of its websites.

Flagg wrote in a a GSA DigitalGov blog post that GCXi shed light on what agencies think about some of GSA’s more technical initiatives, like the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, better known as FedRAMP, and the Electronic Capital Planning and Investment Control program.

“We learned that we have some work to do in this area,” she wrote. “In response, these programs now offer more frequent training, agency consultations and/or ‘office hours’ for customers to call in and get one-on-one assistance.”

She also said GCXi was able to show that federal personnel love sharing open data through the digital analytics dashboard, as well as other free and easy-to-use tools, and depend on and demand content on how to better use these tools.

“In the fast-moving tech world, it’s important to be proactive, so when a listserv conversation highlights a knowledge gap, we build a training class,” Flagg wrote. “When an agency wants to try a new social tool, we partner with them to implement a federal-friendly terms of service agreement.”

Moving forward, the team will continue to evolve the index and its surveys in 2016. OCSIT shared the data from the 2015 index with its staff so it can use an action plan to “evaluate the feedback, and take strategic, data-driven action to follow up on the findings.”